Eltham College melbourne campus does exactly this (I think the school is called something else now).

My DS went to their ELC and we looked very closely at the school for that reason, and that reason alone!!! Pity we didnt warm to teh staff or Principal....maybe its because they hate their working rosters!

I have a friend who works in the English education system where individual schools can program their own holidays. My friend and her husband teach in secondary schools and both have different holidays to each other and their primary school aged daughter. For cases like this the pick-your-own-holiday could work but it just seems too disruptive to me.

I'd imagine in most cases it would be very disruptive to learning. While most schools will say that they plan to the individual children, fact is, the majority of work is taught to the class as a whole, with then additional allowances/effort/teaching to meet the needs of the individuals.

If you had kids dropping out any time during the year, it would mean the teacher who have to be tracking and repeating a lot of work.

Also, have you seen kids at the end of term? A lot of kids get ratty, you can tell when the term is a long one, you can see that some of the kids simply need a break.By letting parents simply pick and choose, you are taking away that even spacing of breaks that currently exist. And what about parents who can't be bothered to sort out holidays.

Vacation care would be impossible, because it runs based on numbers, often in the school grounds. Working parents only get 4 weeks a year, what should they do the rest of the time?

I don't think that would work. Possibly for senior students where you can work on a segment/module method, where they have several classes for each HSC unit, it could be a viable option.

ie everyone needs to study A, B and C in maths. We are running these in Week 1, 5, 7. YOu must nominate the one you will attend... and so on.... so that the senior students can work to the pace that suits them (they already have free periods and time off before exams anyway).

It might also be good if schools/school districts could set their holidays, if they wanted to have them slightly different to the rest of the state. Some areas have extreme heat, snow, harvest and other seasonal factors that might be unique to their area and being able to move holidays might be a good thing. I'm not sure if some religious schools already do this for religious events?

Teachers and allowing times to programme their classes, pressure to not take holidays and placing them on contracts and rosters that make their family life suffer. Also if their children have different holidays additional economic burden to find care and programmes or the school not approving leave to take their child on holidays.

Children not getting breaks because their parents can't afford holidays normally and creating an us and them mentality in the school.

Creating a budgeting nightmare and could possibly create problems in funding school programmes and placing more stringent conditions on the money e.g. bums on seats rules etc and possibly state governments could use this an an excuse to strip away funding from schools.

And what about missed curriculum? Or are schools going to teach differently too?

At my son's high school, they are implementing a curriculum where the students have online units they work through at home, and then in class they do collaborative work based on those units. Students have the opportunity to work 'ahead' if they wish and even do VCE from year 8 onwards if they are up to the challenge, they can also repeat units they want to improve their marks on.

This could be extended to primary school levels, I'm sure!

There was a school in Melbourne's CBD which runs year round so parents can take their children out to suit their work holidays. It started this program maybe 2-3 years ago (I saw it on the news and thought it was quite innovative). I'm not sure if the school is still operating in this fashion or not, maybe an EB member has a child there and can let us know?

There was a school in Melbourne's CBD which runs year round so parents can take their children out to suit their work holidays. It started this program maybe 2-3 years ago (I saw it on the news and thought it was quite innovative). I'm not sure if the school is still operating in this fashion or not, maybe an EB member has a child there and can let us know?

i would imagine in this scenario that teachers would be working on some sort of roster system and only taking 4 weeks annual leave so that would enable the school to be open all the time.

I personally don't think it would work but my youngest DD would love it as she doesnt think there should be school holidays anyway, she wants to go to school all the time!

Okay, like what? You have obviously thought about it, so tells us what would be affected.

This discussion is quite important because the current education system is not particularly user-friendly, and it is not efficiently use the technological innovations which are available to us. It's a 150 year old system working in time which has far removed from it's origins.

The current school system is not keeping up with the life style demands of families with working parents (being they sole parent families or dual employment families).

So, why not try to find a better way instead of just accepting the status quo - with have the tools to have a far more flexible education system, but we are not employing those tools.

I’m not expecting you to be as calm as you might be right now. What I mean is that if your panic levels are through the roof during a stressful situation, let’s bring them down to just under the ceiling.

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